


Katabasis: A Duet

by voices_of_salt



Series: The Riera Cycle [11]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, and Eurydice is an incredibly powerful wizard who works for the deity of death, and our two lovers will meet halfway in the middle, except Orpheus dies and gets to keep his guitar because it's part of his soul, so not exactly canon Ovid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2018-10-12 20:11:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10498611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voices_of_salt/pseuds/voices_of_salt
Summary: Orpheus dies, and Eurydice comes after him.(Recommended listening)





	1. Prelude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two errors: one cosmic, one clerical.

> _'Alas!' said he, 'then dark my doom._  
>  _Where wilt thou go, and go to whom?_  
>  _But where thou goest, I come with thee,_  
>  _and where I go, thou shalt with me.'_
> 
> __- _Sir Orfeo__ , _ Anonymous, 15th century. Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien

“No, you don’t understand: there’s been some kind of mistake,” Simó pleaded.

"Mmhmm."

"I'm not supposed to leave her!"

The monstrous thing at the desk looked up at him, not unkindly.

“I’m sorry, young man, but that’s life. Or death, really.” It reached out and patted his arm with a limb woven of darkness.

“No, I know that’s how it is, but this has to be different. We’ve only just married! There’s so much I need to tell her still. I can’t have told her I love her enough, not nearly enough! That’s unfinished business, surely? I can go back as a ghost?”

The Bookkeeper bent over its accounts, pushing spectacles over what the Lafanese perceived as the onyx-like cluster of a spider’s eyes.

“Hmm, no note about unfinished business.”

It ran a claw down the page.

“No, there's nothing here. No blood oaths. No betrayal. No kinslaying. You didn’t die in extremis.” Its mandibles clicked thoughtfully. “Lafanese, though. That’s something. You all have that ancestral soul - your anima. That’ll stay up there. She can talk to it, even.”

“But that’s not _me_ , that’s the part of me that's duty and family responsibility and blood-ties! She needs my spirit! The part of me that _chose_ her.”

“I’m terribly sorry, young man.”

“She’s a servant of Nerull!” He shouted.

The thing sat back and though he couldn’t read its expression, its voice was severe: “If she’s a true servant of Nerull, then she should know that death is not to be bargained with lightly. I would have hoped she shared that with you. Please move along.”

“No!” Simó said, slamming his fists on the desk. “That’s not good enough!”

Suddenly the Bookkeeper loomed over him - eight-legged, huge, and darker than the void beyond space.

“His people are Valkur’s,” it said, with the true bureaucrat’s weary boredom. “Take him to the quay.”

Hands formed from the swirling mist, seizing his arms and pulling him away. He thrashed, kicking and biting, making contact with nothing but cool vapour.

Desperate, Simó drew in a deep breath and screamed with all he had: “I'm not Valkur’s!”

The thing sat back in its seat. “Please stop wasting my time. A Lafanese and not Valkur’s? Even Olidammara can hardly claim a handful.”

“Check! Check your book!”

“Young man, I have really just about-”

“Check the fucking book!”

“Are you telling me how to do my job? You're Lafanese! You're Valkur’s! The way your people make their living, you all are by default! Rule from management.” It said the last with no little satisfaction.

Simó went limp in the hands of the attendants. His head hung low, his shoulders shaking.

The Bookkeeper sighed. Now the tedious mortal was surely about to cry. Best to send it on its way.

“Take him to the-”

It stopped.

The soul was making the strangest sounds.

Weeping the Bookkeeper was familiar with, and railing, too. Threats, despair, anguish, madness: it had heard them all. But this human man was _laughing_. The Bookkeeper hardly ever even heard the sound.

“What is it?” it demanded.

Simó couldn't speak. He was shaking like a loose sail in the wind. It was too much. The sound burst from him in a torrent. He threw his head back, peals of delighted laughter echoing in the Halls of Eternal Silence.

“What’s so funny?”

Simó let out a few final whoops and raised his head, grinning at the Bookkeeper in a way it found very irritating.

“I’m no sailor.”

“Nonsense.”

“Check. Check in your book, and see what it says.”

The thing pushed its spectacles up over its glinting eyes, squatting low over the tome on its high desk.

Total quiet fell.

The Bookkeeper poured over the rows of neat columns in its ledger.

Simó waited, still held in place by the mist servants.

Mist swirled.

It clacked its mandibles.

“May I ask what it says?” Simó asked demurely.

“Hush!” Snapped the Bookkeeper.

But in the silence it was heard to mutter: “Has to be a sailor. Gods-damned cheek. Scribal error, that's all. Whoever heard of a Lafanese who wasn't a sailor? Rubbish. Sloppy idiots at Intake again. Even the infants have enough potential to be Valkur’s…”

“Not me,” Simó said.

It raised its head, looking at him suspiciously.

“What's _wrong_ with you? A Lafanese and no sailor?”

“Not even a little.” Surly triumph flashed in his eyes.

“So whose are you?”

“I'm hers.”

“The Lady’s?”

“No, her servant’s: Mora Garwhal’s.”

“Fine, then.”

The Bookkeeper took off its spectacles, rubbing its titanic forelegs together in a prim gesture that reminded Simó irresistibly of his Besàvia Domonova.

“Fine. If you want to be a problem then on your own head be it.”

Simó slumped back in the mist servant’s hands, dizzy with relief and hope.

“Bring his luggage,” sighed the Bookkeeper. “We’ll send him to Appeals.”

Simó looked blankly at the thing as it began scribbling furiously in its book, legs busy with a host of different-coloured quills and stamps.

“My what?”

“Luggage. You checked one item of luggage.”

“No I didn't.”

The thing paused, and though it had the expressionless face of a spider, Simó sensed the force of the glare directed his way.

“Oh, going to tell me you don't have any luggage now? First you're Lafanese and not Valkur’s, and now you want to leave me with your junk? I'll hold on to it until you get back, is that it? Anything else the esteemed Senyor Riera wants?”

“Riera i Garwhal,” Simó corrected automatically.

His guitar case hit him in the stomach. He wouldn't have thought a ghost could be winded, but he found himself sprawled across the floor, gasping like any codfish.

“Please take him to Appeals,” the Bookkeeper said.

Simó held tight to his guitar as the mist servants began to drag him away. He was held facing backwards, and he watched the diminishing figure of the giant spider as it hunkered back down over its book. The fog began to close around it, shrouding it in swirling grey.

“Thank you!” Simó shouted suddenly.

The thing raised its head.

“Is she worth it?” It asked, its voice shifting strangely through tone and timbre. Simó saw that it wasn't just the mist that blurred the shape of the Bookkeeper: the whole outline of its body was dissolving into dark fog.

“Yes!”

“We shall see.”

Then it was gone, leaving only wisps of cold grey mist.

“We shall see.”


	2. Fugue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simó encounters his first test, and finds that he is not without allies.

The pain followed him out of unconsciousness. It waited for him with open arms as he rose from the confusion of waking and he greeted it like a friend. Pain was real: if Simó still felt this pain, he couldn’t be truly dead.

Opening his eyes, he saw only mist. The hands that had impelled him forward were gone. So was the solid stone floor of the great chamber, replaced by uneven black rock, slick with dew.

“Hello?”

No sound, not even a whisper of wind.

The great emptiness of the place pressed in from all sides. Around him was limitless void. He could sense the immensity of it: the eternity of death, stretched out into a blank infinity of space.

A hollow ache blossomed in his chest as he gazed out into that swirling, formless grey. The feeling spread out from his heart, robbing his limbs of strength, rising in his throat to choke him. Something inside him was gone, something so essential he had not known he could even lose it. And now, watching the purling eddies of fog, he felt the emptiness within.

For the first time, Simó Riera felt truly alone.

No one in this whole realm knew him. There was no place where he belonged. He was cut off, severed from the great web that had told him he was Simó, that he was a Riera of Lleida, and what that meant. He was cast loose from Mora, too, and the surety he'd had that she could always find him.

Reaching for his guitar case, Simó wrapped his arms around it, clutching it to his chest. Eyes shut, he recalled the pure, ringing delight in his wife’s laughs when she was truly amused and unselfconscious. He remembered his father’s deep bass humming, his mother’s singing through the house, the chaos and clatter of his family at dinner.

The silence pressed in so heavy on his heart that he gasped. He rocked as he sat, cradling his guitar against his body, pressing his forehead to the battered leather.

Even when he'd wandered abroad in the great cities of foreign lands, even when he'd made a hermit of himself, living in the dark and poisoning himself with wine, he’d never really been alone in the world. No matter how far he went, he'd always known that Villa Riera stood behind him, firmly anchored in the black bedrock of Lleida. No matter how lost he was, he knew that the same pole star shone down on the tombs of his ancestors. He might sleep without a shelter over his head, but he could never be homeless or abandoned under the same sky that roofed Lleida. However long the line ran out as he roamed, its end was made fast to an immovable, constant anchor. He had a home, filled with people who might not always understand him but who accepted and loved him all the same. And blessed as he was, he had found a second home in Mora Garwhal’s eyes, seeing himself reflected there.

All that was gone. Simó was cut loose, drifting. Worse still, he had cut himself off from the final homecoming. He was nowhere. And, here beyond the gates of death, where nobody knew him, he was no one. It was as if the knife that severed his ties had cut out his heart.

His head swam. The mist suffocated him so he could hardly fill his lungs - he struggled for each breath, panting like a wounded animal. The grey world began to narrow to a black tunnel, closing in around him.

 _Alone_.

Lleida was gone. Garwhal was gone. Without them, the unanchored cosmos reeled drunkenly around him. He felt the sharp taste of bile rising in his throat.

 _I'm drunk_ , he thought dazedly. _I must get back to Mora. I promised her I'd always come home if I was, no matter what_.

But no, that couldn't be right. Why couldn't he catch his breath? Why was everything growing black?

He was dead: dead, and drowning.

He pressed a clenched fist to his mouth and bit down, hoping the pain would jolt him back to lucidity. He felt nothing. The darkness spread across his vision like ink in water. He bit harder, feeling the warmth of blood on his tongue, but tasting… nothing. What was there to taste? What was his blood, in a place like this? What was a Riera of the Rieras of Lleida, when he was truly, utterly alone?

The answer was simple. The brutal truth of it struck him to the heart, even as the darkness closed over him and he sank unresisting into its depths: he was nothing.

But there were voices there in the black calling out to him.

 _“Who are you?”_ asked the man who had caught him as he entered the world _._

He cried an answer, but the syllables of his name were empty sounds. Simó strained towards the voice, but he had already sunk beyond reach or recall.

 _“Who are you?”_ asked the first voice he had ever heard, safe in the sea of her womb.

They had severed all that bound him to her, and now he did not know.

He sank deeper, so deep that light was a memory. There was danger in this darkness, a second death and final dissolution that waited for him in the black and the silence. Something hungered in the void.

But all was not silence.

 _“Who are you?”_ The voice was unknown, the words strange, though he understood them.

I am alone in the darkness. There is no one here; I am nothing. There is nothing left.

 _“There is debt! Remember your name!”_ The voice screamed; it had always hated the darkness.

But he did not know who he was. What was there to remember? His marrow rotted in the land of the living, the tide of his blood pooling stagnant in dead veins.

 _“Remember!”_ The voice had given him something long, long ago. It had fought for him. But why had it fought, if he ended here? Who was he to have been worthy of such sacrifice? Who was he?

 _“Riera!”_ The voice howled, and the word it said was “river”.

He saw it in his mind’s eye: a dark river in a dark valley.

_“Remember!”_

Simó remembered: he had to find the river. If he followed the river, he would be free. The river called to him out of the depths of ancestral memory, and he knew what he must do.

He felt the exultation of that other mind, the primal triumph of it. It caught him up and bore him upwards, up, up out of the darkness. Surely the force of it would break him. But the breaking point came, and instead of shattering to pieces it was the darkness that broke before the power that had saved him.

 

Opening his eyes, he found himself in a world of grey. The mist still whispered of oblivion, but he fought against it. If he was going to escape, he'd have to think. Think! What did he know about the realms of death?

“ _The river,”_ the voice whispered.

“Where is it?” He spoke aloud, startling himself with the sound of his own voice.

There was no answer. He looked around, but even as he did, he knew the voice had not come from somewhere out in the fog. Simó looked at the oozing bite mark on his own hand, watching the little branching rivulets of red as they tracked across his skin. Perhaps not all souls could bleed in this place, but his could.

“Riera,” he breathed, tasting the full meaning of the word: a river of which he was but a tributary, a course of blood that must continue, flowing from a source that had taken the name of its salvation as its own. How could he have forgotten?

The river.

Garwhal had told him about the river. He'd have to remember everything she'd ever told him. What had she told him?

He knew the river ran through the realm of death, so if he was bound to find Appeals, then surely he must find the river first.

A memory of waking in the Ferryman’s boat made him shiver, and Simó quickly forced it from his conscious mind - pain was useful to him, but he could not withstand even the echoes of that first moment. Still, if he must progress deeper into the bureaucracy of death, then surely he must travel down the river again, deeper into death, not out of it.

He looked around, seeing nothing but swirling fog. There was nothing here. He was still alone, entirely alone, in a formless void. Who was to say that the river even touched this place?

But even as he had the thought, the voice within called out to him, summoning him to his feet. He stood, slinging his guitar across his back, every muscle taut, each nerve straining. And then he felt another call: not from within, this time, but out there - somewhere beyond the mist.

He ran after it, diving into the fog without even a backward glance, not daring to examine this strange sense of surety lest it fail under close inspection. On and on he ran, deafened by the sound of his own footfalls. No voices whispered to guide him, but Simó did not need them. He was the river, and rivers ran into other rivers, and thence to the sea. Its paths were effortless. It was instinctual. He shut his eyes, and he ran.

 

Unresisting, his feet flew over the black stone as it went on, seemingly endless and unvarying. And then - he thought he'd imagined it - the ground changed. The difference was so slight that he could only have noticed it with his eyes closed, but now the once level stone fell gradually away under his feet. Downhill!

Blindly, he sprinted through the fog, guitar case jostling at his back, his sandals slapping against the rock, breathless as he felt the end drawing close - so close, now. The nearness of it pulled at his heart, sharp and sweet, all the sweeter for being just beyond reach.

And then there it was: the river. _The_ River. He could feel the cool air on his face and hear the water lapping at its banks. Opening his eyes, he saw it spread out before him, smooth and black as obsidian, blending out in the distance into the limitless grey. And there, pulled up on the black rock of the banks, was a boat.

Simó fell to his knees, chest heaving, gasping for breath, tears of joy streaking down his face.

He'd found it. If he had found the river, he knew with unreasoning certainty that he had a chance. Not only that, but beyond all hope, this boat had been put in his path. It was a sign, he was sure of it: he might still escape back into life.

For a moment he was so wholly overcome with emotion that he could only kneel there, weak with relief. Then, with a shaky breath nearer to a sob than anything else, he got to his feet and approached the boat.

As he drew nearer, a strange sense of recognition stole over him, something subconscious and wholly ancient. He recognised this craft. In its slender design he saw the distant ancestor of the shallow-draughted _xebecs_ and _feluccas_ of his home. The old wood was dark with generations of varnish, though it was too poor for paintwork. Yet some careful hand had carved crude wards and signs deep into the gunwale. Arcane shapes ran up and down the full length of the skiff on either hand, each different, never repeating. There, the wood was stained even darker by who knew how many centuries of blood offerings, each made fresh, wiped clean, and offered fresh again.

Though he knew the things the shipwrights had feared did not lurk by this river, he squeezed hard at the bleeding bite mark he'd left on his hand - a sign of respect to the ancient vessel and the unknown person who'd made it so long ago.

A few drops fell from his hand. As they fell, the world seemed to slow. Everything was drowned out by the sound of blood spattering on wood. Then Simó started back as it beaded like mercury and _flowed_ into the deep furrows of the wards. The strange lines and figures were limned in a bloody light that pulsed with the beating of his heart. His heart began to race and the light matched it, spreading inch by inch along the gunwale.

Soon whole length of the ship shone crimson with glyphs and sigils. Yet the light did not reflect in the black water, nor did it illumine the mist. Slowly, Simó approached the skiff, reaching out with his hand over the line of wards as if expecting to be burned. The throbbing light reflected on his palm, as though it and he alone were real. And he knew that, though such wards would never have shone so in the world of the living, in this place he could see the true form of the belief vested in them.

He touched his palm to the glowing wood and found it warm under his hand.

Then the light began to glow brighter. Simó scrambled back as the light _flowed_ upwards from each shining ward in a thick, sluggish fountain of molten ruby, flickering with the beat of his heart. Each ward poured out stream that coalesced into a churning vortex. And, at the heart of the maelstrom, it formed into the body of a woman.

Simó’s heart pounded in his chest like a drum, and she burned bright with every beat.

The woman of light raised her head and held out her hand to him. Tears of awe flowed down Simó’s cheeks, and he reached for her. He ran to the skiff, but the light caught him up and carried him inboard. For an instant, his hand touched hers. She pulled him close and pressed her lips to his in the kiss of kinship. And he heard her voice again, not screaming this time, but warm and soft as a summer’s breeze from the sea: “Remember.”

With those words she was gone, dissolving into the crimson wave. The light flowed back into the sigils, and then they were as they had been: soft and red as embers. Simó’s feet touched lightly onto the ship, his hand still outstretched.

Holding on to the guwale with trembling hands, Simó slowly sat himself down. He took a few much-needed deep breaths, then covered his face with his hands. After a moment he looked up again, glaring at the wards all along the boat.

“‘Remember’? Are you joking?” There was no answer, and Simó shook his head. “Well, at least now I know where our family gets its flair for the dramatic.” He patted the glowing gunwale of the skiff.

Shaking his head, he got to his feet. The boat was equipped with a long pole and he reached for it, half-bracing for some other ancestral manifestations. When none appeared he hefted it, feeling the smoothness where many hands had worn it to a fine polish. Simple enough.

 

He looked out over the water. The river did not seem to flow here, going neither to the left or to the right. This was not a place of journeying or transition. But somewhere out there the river carried souls to where they were fated by the gods to go. He almost thought he could feel the pull of such a place: cool and peaceful, tempting him with unresistance.

Simó ignored it. If that was where the universe wanted him to go, he’d tell the universe where to stick its plans. _He_ was going home. He would venture deeper into death, but that was a call he would not answer.

He placed his guitar carefully under the seat amidships and pushed the boat down the bank. With a heave he shoved it into the water and sprang as it moved away from him, using the pole to vault neatly onto the deck.

The aftmost section was slightly raised so the pilot could stand high as they pushed the boat along. Carefully lashing his guitar in place and tying the other end of the line to his ankle, he took his place at the stern.

The river spread out before him, the few ripples from the boat undulating out across the inky water. He took a deep breath. Son of many sailors, child of the children of the waters, Simó hefted the pole, sank it beneath the surface, and pushed.

The bow veered wildly, immediately pointing perpendicular to his intended course.

He pushed again, and it swung back across his path and beyond it until he was headed directly into the middle of the river.

With a sinking heart, he tried again, with much the same result. Worse, possibly.

“Truly?” He exclaimed. “Even in death? I don't even have a real body! This isn't a real boat!”

But was he not one with the river? And attuned to the ship by his very blood? Maybe, maybe…

Shutting his eyes, he closed his senses to all but the river, the deck under his feet, and the pole in his hands. He reached out, and the water resisted the wood, then sank deep to the solid bank beneath the water. He pushed. Simó felt the skiff leap forward, smooth as silk. The water lapped at the cutwater, flowing along the sides. His heart leapt. And then the boat ran bow first into the shore.

Simó sighed. Maybe time would pass less swiftly in death than in the outside world. He didn't know how long Garwhal would wait. He couldn't even begin to ask himself if she _would_ wait, or if she had decided that death was inevitable, including his. But no: he might doubt himself, but not her. She would wait for him. All that remained was for him to do his part.

Gritting his teeth, he pushed off the bank, squared his shoulders, and summoned up an old working song to keep the pace. Thus, Simó Riera i Garwhal de Domonova i Riera de Lleida made his blundering progress down the river of death, beginning a journey that few mortal souls had ever attempted, and which even fewer had been unwise enough to believe they would survive.


	3. Berceuse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Others have waited by the river. Simó finds someone he thought long lost, and finds that he has been given a gift and a chance.
> 
> (Please excuse formatting issues. This didn't copy + paste properly from Word.)

Hours could have passed, or years. Simó had seen no signs to prove he was on the right course, but he dared not question his heading. Instead he believed, and though fog reached for him with soft, sleepy tendrils, he pressed on, leaving swirling grey tatters in his wake.

Sometimes he saw other smallcraft along the riverside, single events that punctuated the bleak monotony. Out of the timeless mists they would appear: coracles, dghaisas, dories, pirogues, caïques, canoes, rafts, and other craft he could not name. All lay rotten and wrecked on the strand, bare black ribs exposed like the carcasses of beached sea monsters.

Simó wondered what peoples the boats had belonged to but he did not stop to investigate. They were not for him.

“Perhaps they would seem whole,” he thought, “if other blood flowed in my veins.” And then he smiled, imaging what Mora would have said to that quintessentially Lafanese supposition.

And he remembered.

_“The sea, at last!”_

_After months in landlocked regions, the first salt-scent had been a benediction, lifting the burden of unbelonging from him. The first distant sight of it had woven him back into a vast, familiar tapestry of real places—of_ sea _places. He stood with his feet in the water and felt the living link to the distant shores of home with each wave that washed over his skin, knowing that the same ocean lapped at the black-sand shores of his ancestral home._

_He sliced across his palm with practised efficiency and watched the thank offering of blood drip into the water._

_“Blood, blood, blood!” Mora peered over his shoulder. “It always seem to come down to blood with your people, doesn't it?”_

_Simó shrugged. “You exaggerate,_ corbeta. _Politics: blood. Religion: blood. History: a river—an ocean of blood. But food? All garlic and peppers.”_

_Mora snorted. “Trust me, I’ve noticed. And it’s usually in quantities sufficient to ensure your ancestors can still feel the kick. But tell me, when you speak of blood and politics are you referring to the obsession with kinship or the general willingness to stab each other?”_

_“Both. I was hoping to express multiple ideas and definitions in one stroke. I thought the overall phrasing pleasingly dramatic.”_

_“By deliberately leaving your terms vague and undefined? Poetic license,_ iskra _?”_

_“I do have that license, but I would term it ‘playing the bard card’.”_

_“This is what I get for trying to have a serious conversation with someone who uses ‘la-la-la’ as a verbal component in spellcasting.”_

_He the last few drops fall, then held out his hand to her. She sighed, bandaging it with a put-upon expression that would've been far more convincing if her smile hadn't kept peeking through._

_The evening sun fell slanting across her face, making the tips of her dark eyelashes glow with hidden copper. Simó could see the subtle shift of expression as a part of her mind concentrated wholly on her task, much as it did when spellcasting. In these moments, he almost thought he could catch a glimpse of her soul: a brilliant mind shining through the mortal clay that held it._

_“Like flame seen through the coloured glass of a lantern,” he thought. “The lantern lovely, to be sure, but beautiful only as it’s lit by the living fire within.”_

_“Thank you, my_ corbeta _,” he said, kissing her as she tied off the bandage._

_“What did you do before I was here to take care of you?”_

_He held up his hand: the skin around the fresh bandage showing a lifetime of crisscrossing ritual scars._

_She sighed. “I married a madman from a mad family from a mad people. The Lunatic Islands.”_

_Simó slipped his arms around her waist, smiling. “And what does that make you?”_

_“A perfectly sane person who was taken in by this” —she gestured at Simó and the guitar case by his side— “whole ensemble. Like one of your sister’s trashy novels.” _

_In moments like these his heart seemed to flood with happiness, overflowing until was drowning and drunk with it. He leant in close, lips brushing her ear: “I may be a madman, but you know it's you I'm crazy for. And I happen to know you read just as many trashy novels as Mercedes.”_

_Mora grinned and turned her head to kiss him. Her lips were slightly chapped from travel, and her god-hand was cool against the back of his neck. Simó marvelled at these little miracles of intimacy, these things he was permitted to know as commonplace, so familiar, but even the thought of them individually still could make his heart ache. Then she leaned deeper into the kiss and he ceased thinking altogether._

_They embraced like dancers, each having perfectly memorised each well-known step, rehearsing until spontaneity yielded perfection: her hand on his cheek, his arm around her waist, a few strands of her hair caught between them, and his moustache tickling her skin. They kissed, and he tasted music on her lips._

“Fuck!”

Simó snapped out of the reverie as the bow of the boat ground against the riverbank. How long had he been wool-gathering this time?

Wearily, Simó pushed off the bank and back out into the deeper waters. He must have performed this manoeuvre a hundred times, and each time it might have been in the exact same place. Glancing around, he he saw nothing to differentiate this from any other part of the river. Alone, he sojourned through an infinite world of endless, lonely grey.

But no—there _was_ something. He stiffened, a cold frisson of terror running down his spine.

A dark shape huddled on the distant bank ahead. At this distance he could not tell what it was, but he dreaded to think what might dwell on the banks of a river such as this. Yet what could he do? If it was friendly, it might tell him where he was, or even be willing to serve as a guide.

“It might also be hungry,” his imagination suggested, “with the sleepless hunger of the cold undead.”

Sometimes, Simó regretted his powers of imagination.

But, with a desperate prayer to any who might hear him in this place, he thought of Mora and drove the little skiff onwards.

As he drew nearer he saw the shape clearly: a figure hunched by the riverside with its knees drawn up, watching over the black mirror of the water. Humanoid, Simó guessed, skin crawling with horror.

The figure had apparently been watching for traffic from upriver because as soon as it saw the approaching craft it sprang to its feet, its whole person inclined forward to see into the murk. Simó’s breath came in ragged gasps as he forced himself onwards against his rising fear. Neither Simó nor the figure spoke, both waiting in silence as the little craft drew slowly closer.

As the mists parted Simó saw the figure more clearly. He could make out the line of the shoulders, the carriage of the head, the stance as it stood waiting. He could hardly breathe, so intense was the tumult of emotions that welled up in his breast, and his question came out in barely a whisper: “ _Frateto?”_

The word carried with the eerie clarity of sound over water and the figure cried out, sprinting to the water’s edge, bounding through the shallows until it was up to the waist. Even then it fought to wade closer, back bent and arms swinging, surging forward through the dark water.

“Simó?” Arnau Riera’s voice rang out, filled with a hope seldom heard in that desolate place. “Is that you?”

It was the hope in his dead brother’s voice that made the tears start in Simó’s eyes. “Arnau!”

“ _Frato!”_

Simó poled towards him, the skiff’s bow veering wildly back and forth. A few feet away, Simó leapt from the boat. The line he’d tied to his ankle snagged him in mid-air, but Arnau caught him as Simó fell sprawling into his brother’s waiting arms. Arnau staggered as he took his full weight, but he caught him and he did not let go.

“My gods,” Simó heard him gasp. “I can't believe it's you.”

Simó could barely find his footing, so tight was Arnau’s embrace. Simó found himself whispering his little brother’s name, stroking his hair, over and over again. Arnau was so warm, so alive—why did he have to feel alive?—and Simó wondered how he'd forgotten the quiet _rightness_ of holding him. He'd grown accustomed to an absence: a piece of his heart cut away and scarred over.

His little Arnau. A part of his heart, returned to him.

“Still not a sailor, elder brother?” Arnau whispered, his tears falling onto Simó’s shirt.

Simó did not trust his voice enough to answer.

_“Simó?”_

_Simó looked up to see Arnau’s face framed in the half-open doorway. The boy’s gaze flickered to the bottle in Simó’s hand and then to the others. The room was full of them, five-deep on the table, clustered in little groups on the floor, jostling in emptied crates, and rolled into out-of-the-way corners._

_“How drunk are you?” Arnau asked._

_“Not very.”_

_“Good.”_

_Arnau heaved the door open and ran to him, stepping lightfoot over an obstacle course of fallen bottles._

_“Hey frateto,” Simó said, putting his bottle down with the careful deliberation of the inebriated. “What fair wind brings you here?”_

_“I’ve something to show you!”_

_Simó sat up straighter, trying to bring his brother into focus. Arnau’s eyes looked huge in the shadowed room, the golden hoop in his ear muted to bronze. The sight filled his heart with a nameless ache. Gloom did not suit Arnau; he was made for the sun._

_Arnau gave him a quick peck in greeting, then made a face._

_“Bah, your breath is terrible! You’ll need a fresh shirt if I'm going to hug you.”_

_Somehow finding a clean shirt in the chaos Simó’s bureau, Arnau held it out to him with unassailable authority. Simó obediently pulled off the old shirt, putting it into Arnau’s waiting hands. Arnau tucked the dirty shirt into his own belt, intending (Simó knew) to wash it for him later. Arnau waited as he put on the new shirt, nodded in satisfaction, then launched himself into Simó’s arms as though shot from a cannon._

_Simó grunted at the impact, but he would have endured far worse for moments such as this. Closing his eyes, he rested his forehead on Arnau’s shoulder. The room still spun drunkenly around him, the sensation stronger without sight to anchor it, but Simó ignored it, clasping Arnau to him. He breathed in deep, letting Arnau anchor him._

_It was as though he held his own youth in his arms: gangly and sweaty, hay tangled in his hair, and shirt stiff with dried saltwater. The sweet scent of late summer grass filled his senses. He remembered tumbling down the hills above Lleida for a game, golden fields and blue sky cartwheeling around him. He could have been this boy he held now. But Arnau carried the promise of a future as a bud held the promise of the flower; Simó never had._

_With his hand on his brother’s back, Simó could feel the beat of Arnau’s heart measuring out all the days he had before him in a steady progression towards a golden future. He held Arnau even tighter, as if to reassure himself that his little brother might not suddenly vanish. Arnau was his miracle: a proof that the gods were not without compassion. They had denied him his dreams, but those dreams would not be denied to his little brother. Happiness was still possible in this world, and it would given to one who deserved it._

_Simó loved Arnau for it, even worshiped him. Arnau was a living eidolon of all he'd wished he could be: the pure and deserving expression of all that was beautiful in the eyes of the gods. He was perfect, and Simó loved him with all his imperfect heart._

_Arnau, alone of his family, did not treat him like some crippled thing. Arnau had all the pitilessness of youth, and it was Clan Riera’s pity that tormented Simó, almost as much as the fact of his failure. Their pity broke him anew each time until sometimes he felt there was nothing left of him but sharp edges._

_They asked, “How are you feeling today?” in gentle voices as if he was on his deathbed._

_They exclaimed, “Simple as sailing!”, then remembered he was there, looking at him with furtive, guilty glances to see if they’d upset him._

_How weak they thought he must be. How it shamed him, their forgetfulness and their care. They never meant to hurt him, but their words still cut. He hated them at times, wanted to scream at them to stop, to leave him be, to just bury him already and let him disappear. But he would not shame himself further, though it sometimes seemed all his unspoken recriminations crowded like shattered glass in his mouth. He no longer tasted the wine, but at least it dulled the pain._

_Then there was Arnau: fifteen, a hurricane child. He was reckless and violent, effortlessly perfect, all scabbed knees and tangled curls. But he was also this solemn-eyed boy who slipped into Simó’s room and had never asked permission, this boy who did not seem to understand that Simó was not broken, this brother whose love was so armoured in ignorance and arrogance that it could not be cut on the edges of Simó’s jagged soul. To Arnau, he was not stillborn promise or duty unfulfilled. He was simply his big brother._

_At last Arnau slipped his arms from around Simó and held up an offering: a little book in a salt-stained oilskin cover._

_“It’s an old journal from the library,” Arnau explained. “One I don't think anyone's read it, oh I don't know, for generations—centuries, even! No one even knew it was there. But_ I _found it.” Arnau began to turn through the yellowed pages with a scholar’s practised delicacy. “I think it describes a refuge that neither you nor I have ever found. There's a sunken pool of some kind—something like a lagoon. If I can find it, I was thinking I might give it to Mercedes for her birthday.”_

 _“You'll_ give _her the pool?”_

_“Well, obviously!” Arnau rolled his eyes, all teenaged exasperation. “It was a place sacred to us Soul Twins once.” He always said “us” and “we”, as if past and present dwelt simultaneously within him. In a way, they did. Arnau was forever searching, delving deep into the island’s hidden places for some new relic of the Soul Twins of the past._

_“And searching for a mirror most of all,” Simó thought._

_Arnau rattled off details, describing the clues that had led him to his discovery, alternating between boasts at his own scholarly ingenuity and delighted speculation as to how Mercedes might react. Simó studied his little brother as he chattered on. They understood each other, Arnau and he. Arnau had guessed that there was more to Simó’s sorrow than the sea; Simó saw that knowledge in his eyes. For his part, Simó encouraged him to read the histories and accounts that none of his peers cared for. He knew Arnau needed them, and would need them even more in the coming years._

_Simó saw the signs already, more clearly than anyone else, even their parents. Fate was closing in upon Arnau, and upon Mercedes. Arnau was fifteen. Mercedes was sixteen. Simó wondered how long it would take before they realised the trick that blood had played on them: the best-kept secret of the Riera clan._

_Already, Mercedes had learned to ignore questions she did not wish answered. She honed herself into a sword’s point: bright, relentless, and focused. She fed the fire of duty burning in her heart until it seared everything else away, even her doubts. Of her questions she made a sacrifice and an offering, all worth it, if only she could be a good sister, if only she could be a good daughter of the clan. No doubts, no questions, only commands and the clear course ahead._

_Arnau was different. Mercedes had kept him safe all his life, so he had learned to be fearless. Having seen no monsters, he did not yet know to fear the dark, and fear and pain were not quite real to him. But Simó suspected that, deep, deep down, Arnau simply could not believe that anything to do with Mercedes could ever hurt him. So Arnau combed the library of Villa Riera, driven by his nameless hope, trying to find an answer to a question he did not yet know to ask, searching for something that would make sense of the incomprehensible forces that had bound his life to another’s. In those who had gone before he looked for stories like his own. He did not want to face his destiny alone; Simó understood that._

_He and Arnau were two insects trapped in the web of fate. Struggle only brought doom upon you sooner, but they were Rieras: they had to fight. They had to try._

The memory faded and Simó found his arms still around Arnau’s shoulders. He stepped back and Arnau made a sleepy noise of protest as though he'd fallen asleep upright in Simó’s arms or been woken from a deep memory of his own. But, shaking off whatever drowsiness had come over him, Arnau kissed him in greeting and smiled at him through tears of joy.

Simó stared at his lost brother. So much had changed but, taken from the flow of time, change had not touched Arnau. He was as he had been, still blazing with the particular, reckless joy that of those who are ignorant of their own bliss. Here was Arnau, forever preserved in the moment of youth’s fullest bloom. Death could not alter what he’d been in life; only the living learn and change.

Simó remembered Mercedes as he'd last seen her. There had been barely a year between Mercedes and Arnau, but they had shared a oneness that made them seem like twins, and more than twins. You would have said that the same life shone out from their two sets of eyes.

All that had changed when Arnau died. Mercedes’s eyes were haunted now, as much by Arnau as by the memory of what she'd once been. No one would look at his little sister and believe she had ever been twinned to this brilliant, heedless creature. Loss was not real to Arnau, even now, but its hand had rewritten Mercedes’ life. They were beings from two different worlds, as sundered from each other as spring from autumn.

“You look the same,” Simó said, meaning to say “well”, but unable to see Arnau without the spectre of his living sister beside him.

Arnau shrugged. “How should I look different?”

Simó could not look away from those eyes, though the contrast with his memory of Mercedes’ made him feel sick. He took refuge in an eloquent Vilar gesture: “ _overwhelmed”_ , it said, and “ _apologies_ ”.

Arnau waved the apology away, clumsily gesturing “ _forgiveness”_ and a “ _regret”_ so emphatic that Simó could hear his tendons creak. Arnau never been gifted at the Vilar subtleties, but there were times that words could only hinder communication. “Though I will say that _you_ look different, brother.”

Simó raised his hand self-consciously to the grey at his temples and Arnau laughed.

“No, no, not that.” He took Simó’s face in his hands, studying it intently. Simó wondered what he saw there, but it made Arnau smile—that dazzling, wholly unselfish smile. “You're _happy_ ,” Arnau said, and Simó felt the ghostly weight of all his old agonies in his brother’s wonder.

“I am,” he agreed.

“But you’re here!” Distress eclipsed Arnau’s delight. “What happened?”

“A mistake.”

Arnau gave him a compassionate look, as if to say, “Who does not believe their death a mistake?”

“No, no: I have a real chance. I _know_ this is a mistake. I can still get home. I’m going to Appeals; it's just a scribal error, but I'll find a way to use it. And I have a Chosen of Nerull on my side. I can get back, I know it.”

“Oh,” Arnau said, his voice suddenly distant. He looked out over the river. “Then you’ll be going on.” Simó realised that this dreamy quality had been there all this time, a disturbing, unfamiliar note in Arnau’s familiar speech. “You know, I thought I might get back, at first, but then I guess it was too late. It wasn't so bad, in the end.” He kicked at the bank with the heel of his boot, digging a hole in the black gravel. “Time is strange here: it doesn't seem to flow, exactly, but I know it must be passing. The memories take you, and you look up, and know a great deal of time must have gone by. And they come more and more often. But I know it's the right choice—to wait, I mean—for Mercedes.”

 _Mercedes._ He had forgotten the way Arnau said her name. How did Arnau make one name carry such a weight of meaning? It was as though Arnau tasted the totality of her soul in those three syllables, the name not some abstract label but rather a statement conveying the fullness of her existence. It was the difference between saying the word “ocean” and experiencing all its moods at once in one impossible, simultaneous moment, both the kiss of waves against the sand and the lethal majesty of the hurricane. Simó had been around enough magic now that he almost thought he could hear it: something more than mere spoken sound, like a spell cast in a language he didn't speak, and one cast on Arnau alone.

And the spell did its work. Arnau snapped out of his reverie, suddenly seizing Simó’s hands with desperate earnestness: “But, how _is_ Mercedes? How is she doing? What is she doing? Is she still with the friends she told me about when she when she was here? Does she talk to you about me? What does she tell her friends about us? Does she speak of me often? Where is she now? Has she found... anyone?”

“One question at a time!” Simó exclaimed, laughing to cover his distress. Alive, Arnau had been deeply empathetic, sensitive to all that Simó could not say aloud. He had been the best beloved child of Simó’s heart, a delight and a charm against the wretched ugliness of the world. Now, although Simó had always known the affection Arnau felt for Mercedes was of an entirely different order and magnitude, it wounded him to see Arnau move so swiftly past the recency of Simó’s own death and loss.Simó could not believe that Arnau would have ever done so in life. But in the Lafanese Islands, they knew that sitting by the river of death wore away at a soul, like water over rocks, until eventually only the primal remained—and what Mercedes and Arnau shared was ancient beyond the count of years.

“I believe she sees something of an Isterian captain; a human man,” Simó managed.

Arnau raised an eyebrow in would-be amusement, a painfully artificial expression that broke his brother’s heart.

_So young, my poor brother, and so alone without her._

“And she did take a shine to a human woman, a mercenary. But I don't think much came of it.” He hurried on, watching Arnau’s face.

Alive, Simó knew they had never been envious of each other’s lovers. It went far beyond simply being Lafanese: “trust” in the normal sense would have been superfluous compared to what they already shared. Death now lay between them and, for the first time, Arnau could envision a world where Mercedes lived without him.

Simó looked into Arnau’s face and saw the appalling vulnerability of those twinned souls laid bare. Here Arnau would stay, not only unwilling but incapable of moving on. Who knew how much longer he must wait? If the river of death flowed on, slowly wearing away at him, how much of Arnau would be left when Mercedes at last joined him? And all the while she would live on without him, marked by his death and by the life she must now live alone. Who knew if he would recognise her when she at last came to join him?

Simó lay his hand soft on the back of Arnau’s neck, holding his gaze. “I don’t think she _breathes_ without thinking of you.”

Arnau turned away, but not before Simó saw the jealousy, grotesque on a face that had never worn it in life.

_Oh little brother, what did the gods do when they made you two?_

“No, you look at me, Arnau Riera. Look at me and listen for once! Mercedes lives for you, in every sense of the word. Every thing she does is because of you—no, do not interrupt, just _listen!_ She fights because it was your shared duty. She tries to be brave because she was always brave for you. She keeps living because _you told her to_. And when she fails it’s because she wants you back so much that I think her own wanting terrifies her so that she hardly knows what to do or how to bear it.”

Arnau covered his mouth with his hand. And there it was: an echo, however faint, of the look Mercedes now wore in life. It seemed even the dead could be haunted.

“Should I have let her stay here?” Arnau whispered. “Did I—what kind of life did I send her back to?”

Simó couldn’t answer that.

“Do you think she wishes she was dead?”

“No,” Simó said. But the truth was not so simple, and Arnau knew it as well as he.

Arnau let out a slow breath, reaching for calm, but the tears fell from his eyes. Simó took his brother in his arms, clasping him tight as the sobs wracked him. He listened to his brother’s broken heart, lost and alone, bewildered without the sister who had cared from him from the moment of his birth. Simó knew that loneliness, and he wept too

But after a time, Arnau grew quieter. He straightened, brushing the tears from his eyes. That strange, distant expression was back, and he stared at the salt tears on his hands as though he did not quite understand where they had come from. For the first time, it struck Simó that this detachment might be a kindness, a mercy granted to those who waited.

“ _Frateto_?” Simó almost feared to intrude.

Arnau raised his face to him, seemingly bemused to find Simó standing there.

“I wonder if all souls in this place bleed and weep,” he said. “What if it’s just us? Something about the blood and saltwater that’s written somewhere too deep for us to escape.” He held out his hands to Simó like a child, showing him the tears. “Do you ever feel like sometimes this is all we are? We bleed, and we suffer, and we sacrifice, and all so another generation can suffer in their turn, with our ghosts there to remind them of their debts and who to hate or love. Do you think it ever ends? Or is this the only way we know we were who we are? That we’re Rieras?”

“I thought so, once,” Simó said softly. “I thought that for a long, long time. But trust me, brother, when I tell you that it is nonsense.” He took his brother's hands in his. “You don’t believe it yourself, even now.”

“Do I not?”

“Would you rather have been born into another family? One where you and Mercedes could not have shared the bond you have?”

Arnau jerked away from Simó’s touch, face contorted with emotion, every trace of otherworldliness gone.

“You have no right to even say such things,” he hissed. “You know nothing about it!”

With a shock, Simó saw that _other_ part of his brother glaring out at him, clearer than he’d ever seen it before. It had been there all Arnau’s life, part of him, but different, as though his brother were a new house built upon ancient foundations. Now, as the river wore him away, the depths began to show through. It burned with the secret, nameless fury all Soul Twins seemed to carry within themselves, slumbering through their happy moments, always waiting for a chance to come out. This deeper part did not love Simó as Arnau did, and perhaps even Arnau did not matter to it so much as its own wants.

Simó held out his hands, reaching out to a part of his brother that had been parted from what it loved, even as Simó had. Over and over, it had died and been reborn, never resting, the anguish of each new parting always as terrible as the first. It was ancient in love and in rage, but most of all in pain.

“Softly, _frateto meu,_ softly now: I didn't mean it anything by it. You know I didn't. Please,” he said, meeting that inimical gaze, “I know it hurts.”

They stood in tableaux: Simó hardly daring to breathe, his brother strange and distant.

“Arnau, it’s _me_. You're not really mad at me, are you?”

He gave a curt shake of his head, glancing quickly away, and Simó’s shivered to see how the very lines of his brother’s body had subtly changed, his brother’s loose-limbed stance subsumed into that perilous, ancient rage. The man before him trembled with the contained violence of his clenched fists and gasped with shallow breaths that seemed to strain against old scars at each inspiration. And yet this was still his mother’s son and the one person, perhaps, whom he loved best of all his family; Simó could never fear him, not really.

“Come on, forgive me?” He coaxed. “I am your big brother, after all.”

The silence stretched on, but Simó was relieved to see the sharp angles of those _other’s_ shoulders slowly melting back into Arnau’s easy grace. That touch of the otherworldly still lingered, but it had always been there; Simó was too Lafanese to be disturbed by the presence of the ancient dead.

“How about you give me your hands and tell me what's really going on in that funny head of yours?”

Slowly, Arnau turned and took his hands, too ashamed to meet his eyes. “I'm sorry,” he murmured. “That wasn't fair, and no way to greet you after all this while.”

“Little brothers throw tantrums. I can take it,” Simó said gently.

“Not in a fair fight, you can't.” Arnau’s teasing reply was reflexive, as Simó had known it would be.

“Fortunately I'm not stupid enough to end up in that kind of unfortunate situation.”

Arnau snorted. But, looking questioningly up into Simó’s face, he sought for forgiveness and found it there, as he always had.

“Thank you for weathering… all of that. It's just that the memories are all I have left. And being alone here, I've had too much time to think.”

“Tell me.”

Arnau took a deep breath, hesitated, then the unhappy words rushed out in a torrent: “I know she thought she _did_ sometimes feel trapped. Trapped by who and what we are. Back in the beginning, I mean. There were times—I think there were times where she almost... I think sometimes she wondered how our lives would have been if we were more like everyone else.”

"Ah," Simó thought, "we come to it at last."

“I sit here, and I can't help worrying that that, after I died, she might have thought that again. And I couldn't bear it, if she was imagining what life might have been like without me. Dying the way I did, alone as I was, and alone as I am: all that I can bear. But if I thought she was alive, suffering, wishing our lives had been different? It’s anguish beyond anything I ever believed I could endure.”

“Even if she did, that's all it is: just idle imaginings.”

Arnau shook his head. “No, it's not, not to me. She couldn't wish for a life without this pain without also wishing for a life without me. And then I have to think of it myself. I have to conceive of a world where things _had_ been different.” He was speaking slowly now, each word requiring an individual effort of will as he forced himself to describe the landscape of his private hell. “I imagine it, and her wanting it. I imagine what it might be like to have existed without our connection, to live and breathe and walk under the sun without knowing all of _her_ , in her entirety. To be blind and deaf, and too ignorant to long for the sunsets and songs I’d never known.” Hollowed out by his confession, he stood silently, laying his hand over his heart in a clenched fist as if to shield it from the forces that buffeted it. “Fuck, I’d rather have shared a moment with her than live forever in that darkness.”

Simó moved to comfort him but Arnau rallied to his own words, shoulders squared and chin raised.

“Even if she has regrets, I have none. I’d choose death again, each time, for twenty-one years with her.” His eyes blazed. “‘Blood owes debt to blood’: family and duty may cost us dearly, but by the gods, the pain’s worth it.” This last he said with such vehemence that he trembled.

Simó could hardly say what he felt in that moment.

It unsettled him, it always had, this single-minded intensity that drove these soul-twins whom he loved. It reminded him of his love for Ysabel: unhealthy, worshipful, and obsessive.

And duty. Once upon a time, talk of duty had been salt in wound that would not heal. Simó had suffered for his family and suffered from them, all to no purpose other than his own private torment and their bewildered shame. He’d tried to pay his debt to his blood, and it had almost bled him dry.

Arnau seemed to realise his misstep as soon as the words left his mouth. Stricken, he babbled apologies: “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s all right,” Simó said, dazed by Arnau’s changing moods. He'd always been mercurial, but in this place his emotions seemed less anchored in reality, sweeping through him as swiftly as squalls. And beneath it all was that sleepy, negative quality that showed itself most in the lulls, when Arnau seemingly forgot both Simó and his own death alike.

He became aware that Arnau was anxiously watching him, clearly recalling the effect words like “family” and “duty” once had. In Arnau’s uncertain, wary gaze Simó saw the echoes of his old torments and could only marvel again at how much his own life had changed.

“Really, Arnau, it’s all right. I won’t say that it doesn’t touch an old wound, but it’s had time to heal. I realised there was more in the world than just... _Lleida_ , you know?”

His little brother nodded slowly, and Simó thought that, of all his family, perhaps Arnau could truly understand.

“I travelled,” he explained, “but it wasn’t so much that I travelled as much as I discovered that Lleida isn’t the only real place. There are other places in the world. And when you go there you find there are other ways to be from Lleida, ways to be a Riera that you can't learn in Lleida. Does that make sense?”

But no: Arnau was looking at him with a look of polite incomprehension on his face, waiting for Simó to start making sense.

With a pang, Simó understood his error.

Simó had shared so much with Arnau, and they had been deeply attached to each other. But Simó had grown used to Mora, for whom new ideas and philosophies were as irresistible as gold to a dragon. Arnau had travelled and seen many strange and wonderful things, but despite it all, his world was still bounded by Villa Riera’s walls.

Both he and his brother had suffered from being Rieras, but Arnau had been too pure a specimen, so much a Riera that he couldn't see beyond the clan that shaped him, even now. He might as well have asked the sea to understand thirst. Alive, he might one day have understood but Simó realised that, in death, Arnau would always be like this: forever young, forever blind.

“Forget it, I'm just being dramatic,” he said kindly, putting his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

Arnau frowned, obscurely aware that he had somehow failed his brother. “No, please tell me, I want to—”

“What I’m really trying to say is that I married your sister’s best friend, and living with her was the saving of me.”

A moment of stunned silence, then Arnau’s face lit up like the sun. “Mora? Mora Garwhal? The Calmerian?”

Simó nodded.That wonderful, total empathy of Arnau’s swept him up, his brother’s delight so absolute that Simó found himself caught up in it.

“Gods and ancestors, I’m so happy for you! _Felicidades!_ ” Arnau seized him in a hug that hit like a broadside, pounding Simó’s back and kissing him heartily. “What do I call you now?”

“Garwhal i Riera.”

“‘Garwhal i Riera!” He exclaimed, noting the precedence of the foreign surname and the home abroad that it implied. “So you’re a traveller indeed! But where do you live? What do you two do?”

“Well, we live on the roads mostly. It's for research, all that travelling. And we've seen so much.” Simó smiled, remembering all the delights and wonders they had seen. There had been the torrent of Calmerian when she'd first introduced him to her discreetly astonished neighbours back in Clara Vallis. There was the way she'd laughed when he pulled them both into an Isterian vernal procession and they’d been pelted with perfume-filled eggs. And that performance he'd given on Isla Ausar, with every member of Clan Vilar delicately suspending all civilised conventions of polite flirtation in deference to his lovely foreign partner.

Gods, but he loved her.

“She would go to learn about burial rites and spells and whatnot, and I studied the music of the peoples we travelled among—what songs they sung, and who sang them, when, and why. Such songs, Arnau! And we have a school, now, teaching necromancy and bardcraft. Our Cousin Prudència’s a pupil, and she loves (well, worships) Mora almost as much as I do. Ancestors, I honestly think that girl would shine Mora’s boots if we let her. For myself, I teach a bit of music, and write rather more.”

“A school,” Arnau echoed. He could not have been more amazed if his brother had said “dragon taming”. But, slowly, he began to smile, remembering Simó teaching him and the other young Rieras to sing and to dance. “You must love it.”

Simó grinned back at him. “More than I could ever hope to express.”

_“But where will we put them all?”_

_“Iskra, sometimes you are hopelessly provincial.”_

_“Now, now, not all of us were given the benefit of a fancy wizarding education.”_

_“Exactly,” she said, smirking like legerdemaincier about to pull off their master trick._

_“Exactly what, oh beauteous admiral of all my joys?”_

_“That's the problem—you're not thinking with_ magic _.”_

_“I readily confess it. School me, magus.” He sat himself on the bed, hands in his lap, a caricature of dutiful attention._

_“No, but listen: you and your clan always talk about how wonderful it is to learn how to sail while voyaging.” She began to pace, gesturing as if addressing the senate. “It sounded like the perfect challenge for a young mind: being aboard ship, testing your skills in new waters, learning new ways, meeting new people with new ideas, honing your craft in the face of the dangers you would face as an adult, but with adults there to moderate the danger.”_

_Simó thought of the crowded berth he'd shared with a dozen other boys and girls, all burning with excitement to see what was over the next horizon, all drunk on the thrill of finally testing their mettle against the worst that wind and waves could hurl at them. He'd failed that test in all but combat, but his friends from that time were unlike any others he'd made before or after. That first testing hammered the truest steel from the their young hearts, and the strongest bonds._

_The Rieras had always held there was no better way to learn the ways of the sea._

_“A travelling school of wizardry.” He considered it, he murmured, rasping a hand over his stubble as he thought it through. “Travelling, but with teleportation instead of a ship.”_

_“Yes!”, she exclaimed, flushed with excitement. “But… what do you think?” He paused to take breath and she headed him off with a torrent of caveats. “Of course it will be difficult; we can't teleport just anywhere. And it does limit the class size. Not that I want a whole gaggle of young wizards around me like ducklings—armed, arcane ducklings, all more or less in control of their powers and their youthful passions—no, it must be a small class size, for sure. And will certainly cost to feed them, young and hungry as they’ll be.”_

_“You almost make it sound like you don't want a school,” he teased, smiling to hear her relentlessly listing the “cons” of what she wanted so badly._

_“But what do you think?”, she asked, searching his face. “I thought—I thought about what you'd said about those voyages in your youth. And even if the practise wasn't deeply sound from an educational standpoint (and it is), I know some of our first students will be like Prudència: Rieras, or Lafanese, at least. And there's you, too.”_

_He felt his heart skip a beat._

_Mora bit her lip. “I, um, I thought you and they would be happiest in your natural habitat: freedom; wanderlust; roaming about causing trouble abroad when not causing trouble at home. Clearly a school isn't quite the same as adventure on the high seas, but—mmfh!”_

_She hadn't expected the kiss. All-powerful magus of Calmeria though she was, he could always catch her flat-footed. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her with all his heart, saying what words could not. Simó had been born with the roaming soul of his people, the desire too impetuous to be sated with the plodding tedium of land travel. Yet travel by sea still made his heart ache, tormenting him with what he longed for in his very bones, but could never have. His Riera blood had given him all his people’s yearning for the sea, but none of the hereditary talent to pursue it. He had been willing to settle down for this school, knowing she would let him roam when he needed to, but he was Lafanese, too: he did not want to travel alone. He wanted crew, shipmates; he wanted family. And Mora had known._

_At last Simó leant back. He watched her eyes flutter open, her gaze fixing upon him. His_ corbeta _, his brilliant, wonderful wife. In a stroke, she had given him the life he’d longed for, even before he himself had known what that was._

_“That's a yes, by the way,” he said, perhaps a little huskily._

_“Yes?”_

_He took her hand in his, raising it to his lips to kiss her fingers. “Yes.”_

_She shrieked, clapping her hands: “Then we’ll do it! We’ll really do it! This is it! We’re starting a school!”_

_He couldn't help himself: he caught her about the waist and lifted her up, spinning her around. Mora laughed, insisting that he put her down, that this was_ not _how one treated a magus of rank, that only a lawless pirate could so disregard Calmerian etiquette._

_When at last he did put her down, she hugged him tight. Her hair tickled his nose, and he could feel the shift of her shoulder blades under his palm as she hugged him even tighter. “Oh my gods,” she whispered, “we’re really going to do this.”_

_She had given him a family. And he would travel: she had given him wings._

_A pause._

_“Simó?”_

_Silence._

_Mora looked up at him, concerned._

_“Are—are you crying?”_

_“No, I come from a very stoic people.”_

_“Do you need my handkerchief?”_

_“No.”_

_He took it, blowing his nose._

_“_ Iskra _,” she said later, “Have I mentioned how much I love you?”_

 _“You have. And I love you, my_ corbeta _, more than I could ever hope to say.”_

And then she was gone, so suddenly that he staggered to find himself without her warm weight in his arms. Death’s river lay dark before him, mist hanging like a pall over the water. The sense of desolation was so intense that for a moment he could only gasp.

“Is it over?” Arnau asked softly.

He started, surprised to see that Arnau was sitting in the hunched position in which he'd first seen him, angled to watch for whatever traffic came down the river.

Simó wiped the tears from his eyes. “Is what over?”

“The memory; it’s been an hour at least. They take you like that, more and more often the longer you stay. After a while, you can hardly focus on the present for all the memories crowding in.” He looked out over the river’s inky expanse, black water slowly merging in the distance into formless grey. “It makes waiting easier, I suppose; all that remembering helps one forget.”

Simó felt a riptide of dread tugging at his heart. “An hour?” He'd noticed the strange intensity of memories in this place, but hadn't imagined such a terrible degree of time distortion. How many hours had already slipped away from him? “Can you stop them, or fend it off? I can't afford to let this keep happening, not with so much at stake!”

“Oh _frato_ ,” Arnau said. “I am sorry.”

“‘Sorry’?”

Simó stared at him, seeing the compassion in his brother’s eyes. “You must know— _surely_ you know that you can't win this? You can appeal, but who has ever heard of anyone succeeding? If love was enough…” He trailed off, heartbroken for his brother and for himself. “It's been too long, Simó. She would have brought you back by now, if she could.”

“No,” Simó whispered, though all his logic told him that what Arnau said was true. He'd always known from the beginning—who better than the husband of the Venator Mortis? He was the son of a people who laughed at all laws not their own, who rebelled against any unjust rule, and who dodged the noose again and again. But even the Lafanese would not dare to defy death in her own kingdom.

And yet he loved Mora so.

Simó crumpled to the ground, pulling his guitar case to him. At least the guitar understood what he had lost: it had sung those songs with him. He had poured out his love through it, with it, until those six strings seemed his very heartstrings. All those songs he had penned, writing “I love you” in every note; his guitar had lost its heart as surely as Simó had.

Now those joys belonged to another world, preserved in his songs like amber: brittle, circumscribed moments whose living essence he could no longer touch. He reached inside himself for a song of her but found… nothing. The music would not come. Perhaps it had died with him, without her.

He bent double against the pain of that thought, and felt Arnau’s arms holding him.

But it couldn't be. If his music was gone, who was he, and what was his love?

Simó reached blindly for the clasps of his guitar case.

What if the music was truly gone beyond recall? Could one even sing of something as fragile and mortal as love beyond the gates of death?

His fingers scrabbled against the metal clasps.

_No, he could still sing; he must._

One by one, he flipped them open with shaking hands.

 _Love lives on_ , his poet’s soul cried. _I may perish, but my love for her can't.To love is to defy death and steal a fragment of eternity, if only for a moment._

He took a deep breath, shutting his eyes.

_And I love her still._

He opened the case.

At first he hardly knew what he saw. He could only stare bewildered disbelief. The scuffed, humble instrument he knew so well was unrecognisable. From top to bottom, the old guitar was transformed, shining from within with a soft, golden glow as beautiful and luminous as the dawning sun seen through sea mist.

Arnau leapt to his feet, gawking at the contents of the open case.

“You don’t have a magic guitar, do you? Has it done this before?”

“No,” Simó said, utterly amazed. “I haven't even opened it since coming here.”

Arnau stared. “You know, I feel and idiot for not asking before, but how by all the gods did you even manage to bring a fucking _guitar_ into the realms of death in the first place?”

“I—I don't know. It seems to have just… come with me. The Bookkeeper threw it at me, actually.”

“Ancestors,” Arnau swore, real awe in his voice. “And I always thought you were joking when you said it was part of you.”

Simó put out his hand and touched the familiar wood. For a brief instant he was aware only of the gentle warmth of us under his fingers. Then, all at once, memories washed over him - not the unnatural, all-consuming reveries of the realms of death, but in gentle flashes like sparks rising from a hearth. He thought of the red roof tiles of Villa Riera in the soft evening light. He remembered sleeping in the quiet haven of his mother’s arms. He could hear the soft rumble of his father’s voice singing a lullaby. He thought of familiar footsteps in the long halls, of singing voices in the courtyard under the summer stars, and the thousand smells, tastes, and sounds that spoke of home. His heart ached to think of it in this cold, lonely place.

What had the Bookkeeper said about the Lafanese?

 _“You all have that ancestral soul—your_ anima _. That’ll stay up there. She can talk to it, even.”_

 _“But that’s not me,”_ he'd protested. _“That’s the part of me that's duty, and family responsibility, and blood-ties! She needs my spirit! The part of me that chose_ her _.”_

He took the guitar into his lap and laid his fingers on the strings.

“What _is_ it, though?” Arnau asked.

Simó strummed out a chord, the music making the guitar’s light shift and dance like sunlight through water.

“I think it's my _anima_ ,” he said, and knew that it was true. “I think—” But Arnau’s hand suddenly closed like a vice on his shoulder, and Simó looked up in alarm at his brother’s stricken face.

“What's it doing here, then?” Arnau cried. When Simó did not answer at once he shook him, hard. “What did you do?”

“Nothing! I have a different life, but—”

“You left us! How could you leave us?” His brother shouted, the last word ending in a bewildered sob.

Simó’s panicked mind seized upon the literal sense of the question.The thing should not even be possible. No _anima_ had ever passed the doors of death. They stayed in Lleida, joining the great choir of spirits who watched over their descendants and their island. An _anima_ might fly on gull’s wings if it chose to, travelling to scattered kin by blood, marriage, or friendship. But _animae_ were things of the mortal world, symbols of undying social ties; only foreigners truly died to their clans.

And yet his had.

Simó searched his heart, panic rising, terrified that it might be as Arnau feared. He had felt like an outsider so often, and he had left Lleida, finding his life elsewhere. Had he truly never belonged, as it so often seemed, such that his familial soul could not return to watch over the island his clan called home? Or had his unorthodox ways cut him off, severing him from his people?

No. He did not believe it This was something strange and different, but so was Simó himself. Yet though he was strange, he knew himself to be a strange _Riera_. He belonged, even in unbelonging.

“I don't think it's that,” Simó managed, mind still reeling with possibilities.

“Then what is it?”

Simó struck another chord, and he felt again that profound sense of familiarity, like the first homecoming step over the threshold of Villa Riera. He could almost smell the olive oil lamps and the lemon trees in the courtyard, could almost hear the comfortable din as the halls echoed with the hustle and bustle of the clan living out its daily life.

“What? Tell me!” Arnau demanded.

“I think,” Simó said slowly, “that you're looking at this the wrong way: don't think of this as a sundered piece of the family, separated from the whole. Think of it as my still being connected through this piece that’s followed me, like a sliver broken off from a lodestone.”

“Simó, can you dispense with the convoluted imagery just this gods-damned once and speak plainly?” Arnau's words seemed harsh, but he was teasing, too—consoled by Simo’s confidence. His little brother trusted him. He wanted to believe him. Ancestors, but Simó hoped he was right.

“At first my only hope was that I’d been misfiled to the wrong deity, Arnau. They were going to send me to Valkur, but it didn't work, because I'm no sailor. I seized on it because I thought maybe that kind of clerical error might _possibly_ have resulted in me being sent back to life, but we both know it was the merest shadow of a hope. But now there's this: the part of me that should dwell on with the clan the living world is here. An _anima_ separates from the soul in death, but here mine is!"

He stared in wonder at the guitar. Family had been Simó’s torment. He'd suffered for so long, giving everything he had—more than he ever believed he had to give—and he had received nothing in return. The best he had to offer had still been so utterly inadequate that it had not merited even the slightest reprieve from either his family or from fate.

He'd had to do everything himself: find a life for himself, find purpose, find happiness. So much of it alone. He loved his family, but they had failed him.

But now, when it mattered most, the clan had reached out as it never had to any Riera ever before. It seemed that he had been worthy all along, and that all he'd given had been valued at it's true price. In fact, it had merited nothing short of a miracle: this undying piece of him, which belonged not to himself but to Clan Riera, had followed him to the underworld.

The collected _animae_ of the Rieras could not defy death. Yet it was nevertheless a force composed of the very essence of what it was to be Riera. It could sure as hell knock back a shot, damn the odds, wager everything, and throw the dice—metaphysically speaking. And that had given him what he desired most of all: a chance.

After feeling so alone, so apart, so essentially different from his family, after so much doubt and pain, here was the truth: he had always been a Riera.

Simó lay his hands on the worn wood, feeling again that comforting warmth. The light blurred as his eyes filled with tears.

“What? What is it?”

He turned his face up to his little brother, smiling to find himself in such a state of grace. Dashing his tears from his eyes, he reached for his little brother’s hand, the human contact reassuring him that this was real.

“Arnau,” he said, “ _I'm not fully dead.”_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Katabesis: the B-side](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11624925) by [grave_remarks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grave_remarks/pseuds/grave_remarks), [voices_of_salt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voices_of_salt/pseuds/voices_of_salt)




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